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Concrete Thinking for Sculpture Rowan Bailey This Article Proposes

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Concrete Thinking for Sculpture Rowan Bailey This Article Proposes University of Huddersfield Repository Bailey, Rowan Concrete Thinking for Sculpture Original Citation Bailey, Rowan (2015) Concrete Thinking for Sculpture. Parallax, 21 (3). pp. 241-258. ISSN 1353- 4645 This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/25581/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided: • The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy; • A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and • The content is not changed in any way. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ 1 Concrete Thinking for Sculpture Rowan Bailey This article proposes to explore the variegated plays of concrete as a travelling concept through four specific examples, viewed from the locality of the Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle in 2015.1 It will be argued that ‘concrete’ makes possible a triangulated reading practice in, of and for sculpture. The first example looks to the use of concrete, as a material, in some of the ‘technical’ experiments of Henry Moore, from the 1920s-1930s. The second example is the only public concrete sculpture by Barbara Hepworth on record, entitled Turning Forms. This is a kinetic work which was commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The psychic registrations of form-in-concrete will be explored through the aesthetic reception and understanding of these works. The third example examines the interplay between abstraction and concretion in a work of structural engineering: the Arqiva transmission tower on Emley Moor. This structure is a working utilitarian model of the telecommunications industry which took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also a sculptural monument in a landscape of other design ‘types’. The fourth example considers the recent display of Lygia Clark’s Bichos at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2014-2015. Bicho Pássaro do Espaço (‘Creature Passing through Space’) (1960) reveals a particular translation between concrete thinking and concrete experience. These examples call upon the semantics of the concrete as a thought process and will track a journey into a region marked by three interconnected points: the concrete specificity in the material works selected, the broader field of concrete forms within which the sculptural may sit and the philosophical/aesthetic language of concrete for sculpture. Before entering into the space of the examples themselves, it is necessary to position the theoretical framing of concrete both as a material and as a thinking process. Meike Bal’s chapter on the ‘concept’ in her 2002 text Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, in particular, the section ‘Travel between Concept and Object’, helps to articulate the double-meaning of ‘concrete’ central to the current exploration. Bal discusses a necessary dynamic exchange in the methodological formation of ‘cultural analysis’, which she defines as a dialogue between the object of analysis and the ‘thrust of interpretation’.2 Her consideration of concepts in affiliation – focalization, the gaze and framing – gives place to a visual poetics, derived from interdisciplinary exchanges between different modes of analysis. The dialogues between these positions inevitably transforms pre-existing frameworks of conceptual understanding.3 The travel between concept and object therefore, is a process whereby, through acts of 2 close reading and analysis, concepts are informed by the objects they encounter. In this context, the concept ‘concrete’ – as part of a thought process and as a material – must be put to the test through the examples under discussion. Concrete-as-material The etymology of concrete has Latin roots. From the past participle concrescere – ‘grow together’ – to the adjective concretus – ‘condensed, hardened, thick, stiff, congealed, clotted’, concrete not only describes how it becomes a form, it also expresses the character of its fixed condition. Concrete-as-material carries within itself the properties and qualities of its own formation. It is always already an amalgamation of contexts. Furthermore, concrete marks the endpoint of a process: the mixing of water, cement – such as fly ash or limestone – and different material aggregates – whether crushed stone, gravel, sand or clay – when contained in a mould or supported by the framework of steel rods, ‘fuses together’ to assume the status of stone-like consistency. Tim Ingold addresses the relations between materiality and matter in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011) and makes a call for the concrete experience of material form to be registered in and through the reading process. Ingold’s point is that in most cases materiality and material culture neglect to address materials, the stuff of productive activity. He argues that studies of material culture in particular ‘take as their starting point a world of objects that has, as it were, already crystallised out from the fluxes of materials and their transformations. At this point materials appear to vanish, swallowed up by the very objects to which they have given birth’.4 In an attempt to get to grips with material, Ingold turns to the work of James Gibson, psychologist and author of The Ecological Approach to Perception (1979) and David Pye, Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art, between 1964 and 1974, to play out an argument between priorities given to matter/mind relations; to whether material properties are indeed the properties of matter or the qualities the mind projects onto them. In brief, Ingold is of the position that the world of materials is an environment, following Gibson, which is processual and relational as opposed to being the ‘fixed essential attributes of things’.5 This consideration of material – as always already contextualized within a set of relations that are subject to transformation through engagement – is an environment where the material particularities of sculptural forms impact on the ways in which we think about them. The world of materials and the world of humans, in Ingold’s sense, are ‘overlapping regions of the same world’,6 what could be 3 described as a ‘synthetic fusion’ between the natural and the social, the stone and the human. Concrete as a thought process As an adjective and a verb, concrete is used in the speculative philosophy of Hegel and reconfigured in the writings of Marx. The ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’ – terms familiar to German Idealists and historical materialists – describe a process, where the transition from the abstract to the concrete or from the concrete to the abstract, serves as the foundation stone upon which a system of relations is built. Hegel’s 1808 essay ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’ delivers a verdict on the concrete.7 Concrete thinking is a mode of processing or capacity to consider context as opposed to registering phenomena and experience in isolation. It is the networks and pathways between distinct substances that produce the triangulated spaces of productive exchange. Hegel’s example of the saleswoman in the market who labels the convicted criminal a murderer is identified as an abstract uneducated thinker who simply isolates and fixates on a single moment of action to make a judgment. The educated person, however, is able to reflect on the possible conditions of the so-called ‘criminal’s’ life; upbringing, the circumstances of poverty, lack of education, injustice, etc. The ‘concrete universal’ (das Konkrete Allgemeine) for Hegel refers to the essence of a thing embedded into and constitutive of a world of interacting things; its driving force carries otherness/difference within itself as an inner principle of development, thus serving as a composite and compound category to describe the dialectical process and its operations. Concrete, as we experience it in structural form as the end point of a fluid and relational manufacturing process, is also a concept that describes what thinking can do to itself: the ‘synthetic fusion’ of the dialectic is analogous to the ‘fusing together’ of materials in the process of producing concrete. In the Grundrisse of 1858, Marx addresses the differences between ‘concrete for thought’ and ‘actual concrete’ – the material particulars of differentiation which might trouble speculative processes. He agrees that the character of the concrete is there in the presence of thinking, but questions Hegel’s conception of the ‘real’ as a product of thought, arguing that the reproduction of the concrete in the mind is a tautology ‘in so far as the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception; a product, rather, of the working-up of observation and conception into concepts.8 As is well known, 4 Marx is keen to show how material life conditions are the foundation or basis for concrete relations in and through modes of productive activity. The abstract model of base/superstructure, outlined in the collection of extracts that make up The German Ideology, is apt in its capacity to describe the issue at hand. We all remember turning Hegel on his head as we glimpse the distortions of ourselves in the camera obscura.9 Adrian Rorty’s description of the character of concrete usefully describes this dialectical condition. In Concrete and Culture – A Material History (2013) he writes: The refusal of concrete to stay securely within any one class is one of its recurrent features.
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